(A revolutionary work since its publication, Black Power e...)
A revolutionary work since its publication, Black Power exposed the depths of systemic racism in this country and provided a radical political framework for reform: true and lasting social change would only be accomplished through unity among African-Americans and their independence from the preexisting order. An eloquent document of the civil rights movement that remains a work of profound social relevance 50 years after it was first published.
Stokely Speaks: From Black Power to Pan-Africanism
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In the speeches and articles collected in this book, th...)
In the speeches and articles collected in this book, the black activist, organizer, and freedom fighter Stokely Carmichael traces the dramatic changes in his own consciousness and that of black Americans that took place during the evolving movements of Civil Rights, Black Power, and Pan-Africanism. Unique in his belief that the destiny of African Americans could not be separated from that of oppressed people the world over, Carmichael's Black Power principles insisted that blacks resist white brainwashing and redefine themselves. He was concerned not only with racism and exploitation, but with cultural integrity and the colonization of Africans in America. In these essays on racism, Black Power, the pitfalls of conventional liberalism, and solidarity with the oppressed masses and freedom fighters of all races and creeds, Carmichael addresses questions that still confront the black world and points to a need for an ideology of black and African liberation, unification, and transformation.
(A revolutionary compilation of speeches which produced a ...)
A revolutionary compilation of speeches which produced a political groundwork for many of the radical movements in the following decades
The now legendary Dialectics of Liberation congress, held in London in 1967, was a unique expression of the politics of dissent. Existential psychiatrists, Marxist intellectuals, anarchists, and political leaders met to discuss key social issues. Edited by David Cooper, The Dialectics of Liberation compiles interventions from congress contributors Stokely Carmichael, Herbert Marcuse, R. D. Laing, Paul Sweezy, and others, to explore the roots of social violence.
Against a backdrop of rising student frustration, racism, class inequality, and environmental degradation—a setting familiar to readers today—the conference aimed to create genuine revolutionary momentum by fusing ideology and action on the levels of the individual and of mass society. The Dialectics of Liberation captures the rise of a forceful style of political activity that came to characterize the following years.
Stokely Carmichael was a "militant" civil rights activist and stood at the forefront of the "Black Power" movement.
Background
Stokely Carmichael was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, on June 29, 1941. His father, Adolphus, who died when he was in his late forties, moved with Stokely's mother, Mabel, to the United States when their son was only two-years-old. Although his father had been swept up by the cause of Trinidad's independence, he left his homeland to better his family's economic fortunes and moonlighted as a New York City cab driver, while Mabel found work as a maid. Young Carmichael was left in the care of two aunts and his grandmother. Carmichael joined his parents in New York City's Harlem when he was eleven-years-old and became the only black member of a street gang called the Morris Park Dukes. His status as a foreigner and his self-described "hip" demeanor assured him of popularity among many of his liberal, affluent white schoolmates. But Carmichael, a bright student, settled down after his family moved to the Bronx and he discovered the lure of intellectual life.
Education
Carmichael attended Tranquillity Boy's School. After his parents moved to the Bronx, he was admitted to the Bronx High School of Science, a school for gifted youths. During Carmichael's senior year in high school, four African-American freshmen from North Carolina Agricultural Camp; Technical College in Greensboro, North Carolina, staged a sit-in at the white-only lunch counter in Woolworth's. The action of these young students captured the imagination of African-Americans and some sympathetic white students throughout the United States. Some young people in New York City, including Carmichael, joined a boycott of the city's Woolworth stores which was sponsored by the youth division of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE). CORE hoped that the boycott would pressure Woolworth's owners to desegregate all of its stores' facilities throughout the country. Carmichael traveled to Virginia and South Carolina to join anti-discrimination sit-ins and because of his growing sensitivity to the plight of African-Americans in the United States, especially in the segregated South, he refused offers to attend white colleges and decided to study at the historically black Howard University in Washington, D. C. At Howard from 1960 to 1964, Carmichael majored in philosophy while becoming increasingly involved in the civil rights movement. He joined a local organization called the Non-Violent Action Group which was affiliated with an Atlanta-based civil rights organization, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, called "Snick").
Career
Carmichael was interested in politics even then, especially the work of African-American socialist Bayard Rustin, whom he heard speak many times. At one point, he volunteered to help Rustin organize African-American workers in a paint factory. But the friendliness, doctrinal and otherwise, of Rustin and other African-American intellectual leftists with the white liberal establishment would eventually alienate Carmichael. In the spring of 1961, when Carmichael was 20, he spent 49 days in a Jackson, Mississippi jail. One observer said that Carmichael was so rebellious during this period that the sheriff and prison guards were relieved when he was released. After graduating in 1964 with a bachelor's degree in philosophy, Carmichael stayed in the South as much as possible, sitting-in, picketing, helping with voter registration drives, and working alongside of other leaders of SNCC. He was especially active in Lowndes County, Alabama, where he helped found the Lowndes County Freedom Party, a political party that chose a black panther as its symbol in order to comply with a state requirement that all political parties must have a visual symbol to assist voters. The black panther was indigenous to Alabama and seemed both a dignified symbol for empowered African-Americans and an effective response to the white rooster that symbolized the Alabama Democratic party. Southern response to the civil rights workers was often so violent that demonstrators were bruised, wounded, or even killed by policemen, by members of the Ku Klux Klan, or other individuals. There were six civil rights workers murdered that year, but this only made Carmichael, and others, more determined than ever to work for desegregation. The turning point in Carmichael's experience came as he watched from his locked hotel room while outside, African-American demonstrators were beaten and shocked with cattle prods by police. The horrified Carmichael began to scream and could not stop. As his activism deepened and he saw the violence doled out to violent and non-violent protesters alike, he began to distance himself from non-violent tactics and its proponents, including Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1965, after Carmichael replaced the moderate John Lewis as the president of the SNCC, he joined Martin Luther King, Jr. , Floyd McKissick of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and James Meredith, who had been the first African-American student to attend the University of Mississippi, on a "freedom march" in Mississippi which Meredith had first attempted alone. After he was shot during his solitary march, Meredith welcomed the help of other civil rights leaders. Carmichael and McKissick had trouble agreeing with King that the march would be non-violent and interracial. Carmichael had become increasingly hostile to the aid offered by white civil rights workers. During this march, Carmichael began to articulate his views about "Black Power" before the assembled television cameras. Americans reacted strongly to a slogan that seemed to indicate that African-Americans wanted to replace white supremacy with African-American supremacy. Carmichael later defined "Black Power" to mean the right of African-Americans to define and organize themselves as they saw fit and to protect themselves from racial violence. After the march, white members of the SNCC were not encouraged to stay and Carmichael and other SNCC leaders began to talk about "revolution. "Carmichael's articulation of "Black Power" evidenced by his 1967 book Black Power (co-written with Charles V. Hamilton), and his article "What We Want" advanced the idea that mere integration was not the answer to American racism, and that America formed only a piece in the puzzle. Carmichael and Hamilton linked the struggle for African-American empowerment definitively to economic self-determination domestically and the end of imperialism and colonialism worldwide. "What We Want" described the need for African-American communal control of African-American resources. The term "Black Power, " however disconcerting to moderate African-American leaders, absolutely terrified mainstream whites; many interpreted this term to mean not empowerment, but rather African-American domination and possibly even race war. Journalists demanded repeatedly that Carmichael define the phrase, and he soon began to believe that no matter what his explanation, they would interpret it as sinister. Pressed by Life magazine, Carmichael said "For the last time, 'Black Power' means black people coming together to form a political force and either electing representatives or forcing their representatives to speak their needs [rather than relying on established parties]. 'Black Power' doesn't mean anti-white, violence, separatism or any other racist things the press says it means. It's saying 'Look buddy, we're not laying a vote on you unless you lay so many schools, hospitals, playgrounds and good jobs on us. '" However, Carmichael sometimes gave the term a different spin when he spoke to African-American audiences. As James Haskins recorded in his book, Profiles In Black Power (1972), Carmichael explained to one crowd, "When you talk of 'Black Power, ' you talk of building a movement that will smash everything Western civilization has created. " Through statements like this, Carmichael and his movement continued to be seen by many in mainstream America as a movement not to build, but to destroy. International Focus As the revolutionary fervor of the 1960s deepened, the SNCC became a "Black Power" vehicle, more or less replacing the hymn-singing integration of earlier days. Yet Carmichael had gone as far as he could with the organization, deciding not to run for re-election as its leader in 1967, just before the organization fell apart. Carmichael's political emphasis had shifted as well; he began speaking out not only against the war in Vietnam, but against what he called U. S. imperialism worldwide. Time reported that Carmichael had traveled the world denouncing his adopted country, speaking to cheering crowds in Cuba, and declaring, "We do not want peace in Vietnam. We want the Vietnamese people to defeat the United States. " Time called him a purveyor of "negritude and nihilism" and noted that many U. S. politicians wanted to jail him for sedition upon his return to the country he called "hell. " Upon his return in 1968, U. S. marshals confiscated his passport. Meanwhile, the radical Oakland, California-based Black Panther Party, a Black group which advocated African-American liberation by "any means necessary, " had made him their honorary prime minister. He would resign from that post the following year, rejecting Panther coalitions with white activists. He based himself in Washington, D. C. and continued to speak around the country. In 1969, Carmichael left the United States for Conakry, Republic of Guinea, in West Africa. He moved there, in part, to assist in the restoration to power of the deposed Ghanaian ruler Kwame Nkrumah, who lived in Guinea and served as an exponent of the sort of anti-imperialist, pan-African empowerment Carmichael had espoused in the United States. While in Guinea, Carmichael took the name Kwame Ture and, over the next decades, founded the All-African Revolutionary Party and continued to speak as an advocate of revolution to answer the problems of racism and injustice. In 1993, speaking at Michigan State University, he made it clear that he still considered capitalism the source of most of the problems he had been studying during his career as an activist. In a Michigan Chronicle interview he stated, "Those who labor do not enjoy the fruits of their labor, we know that to be slavery, " but his 1992 afterward to a new edition of Black Power showed that he felt real progress had been made in certain respects in the U. S. , "From 1965 to 1992, no one could deny that change has occurred. " In 1996 Carmichael was diagnosed with prostate cancer and was honored by his birth nation with a $1, 000 a month grant, awarded to him by the government of Trinidad and Tobago. Benefits in Denver, New York, and Atlanta were also held to help pay his medical expenses. Steeped in the civil rights struggle, Carmichael emerged as one of the firebrands of the African-American militant movement in the 19606, and unlike many of his compatriots from that time, he has in the intervening years experienced neither burnout nor conversion; the years have only refined the flame of his convictions, even in the face of cancer. In 1998 Ture died of prostate cancer at the age of 57 in Conakry, Guinea.
Achievements
Stokely Carmichael soared to fame by popularizing the phrase "Black Power" and was one of the most powerful and influential leaders in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
Quotations:
“Dr. King's policy was that nonviolence would achieve the gains for black people in the United States. His major assumption was that if you are nonviolent, if you suffer, your opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to change his heart. That's very good. He only made one fallacious assumption: In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none. ”
“If a white man wants to lynch me, that's his problem. If he's got the power to lynch me, that's my problem. Racism is not a question of attitude; it's a question of power. Racism gets its power from capitalism. Thus, if you're anti-racist, whether you know it or not, you must be anti-capitalist. The power for racism, the power for sexism, comes from capitalism, not an attitude. ”
“This country is a nation of thieves. It stole everything it has, beginning with black people. The U. S. cannot justify its existence as the policeman of the world any longer. I do not want to be a part of the American pie. The American pie means raping South Africa, beating Vietnam, beating South America, raping the Philippines, raping every country you’ve been in. I don’t want any of your blood money. I don’t want to be part of that system. We must question whether or not we want this country to continue being the wealthiest country in the world at the price of raping everybody else. ”
“Racism is both overt and covert. It takes two, closely related forms: individual whites acting against individual blacks, and acts by the total white community against the black community. We call these individual racism and institutional racism. The first consists of overt acts by individuals, which cause death, injury or the violent destruction of property. This type can be recorded by television cameras; it can frequently be observed in the process of commission. The second type is less overt, far more subtle, less identifiable in terms of specific individuals committing the acts. But it is no less destructive of human life. The second type originates in the operation of established and respected forces in the society, and thus receives far less public condemnation than the first type. When white terrorists bomb a black church and kill five black children, that is an act of individual racism, widely deplored by most segments of the society. But when in that same city - Birmingham, Alabama - five hundred black babies die each year because of the lack of proper food, shelter and medical facilities, and thousands more are destroyed and maimed physically, emotionally and intellectually because of conditions of poverty and discrimination in the black community, that is a function of institutional racism. When a black family moves into a home in a white neighborhood and is stoned, burned or routed out, they are victims of an overt act of individual racism which many people will condemn - at least in words. But it is institutional racism that keeps black people locked in dilapidated slum tenements, subject to the daily prey of exploitative slumlords, merchants, loan sharks and discriminatory real estate agents. The society either pretends it does not know of this latter situation, or is in fact incapable of doing anything meaningful about it. ”
“You see that honky McNamara on television? He says, "Yes, we are going to draft thirty percent of the Negroes in the Army. This is where they can have equal opportunity. Yeah. Yes… it's true that they are only ten percent of the population, but this is a better chance for them. " When that honky talk about drafting thirty percent black people, he's talking about black urban removal—nothing else. ”
“White liberals are always saying, "What can we do?” I mean, they’re always coming to help black people. I thought of an analogy. If you were walking down the street and a man had a gun on another man – let’s say both of them were white – and you had to help somebody, whom would you help? It’s obvious to me that if I were walking down the street, and a man had a gun on another man, and I was going to help, I’d help the man who didn’t have the gun, if the man who had the fun was just pulling the gun on the other man for no apparent reason – if he was just going to rob him or shoot him because he didn’t like him. The only way I could help is either to get a gun and shoot the man with the gun, or take the gun away from him – join the fellow who doesn’t have a gun and both of us gang up on the man with the gun. But white liberals never do that. When the man has the gun, they walk around him and they come to the victim, and they say “Let me help you, ” and what they mean is “help you adjust to the situation with the man who has the gun on you. "
“Reorientation means an emphasis on the dignity of man, not on the sanctity of property. It means the creation of a society where human misery and poverty are repugnant to that society, not an indication of laziness or lack of initiative. The creation of new values means the establishment of a society based on free people, not free enterprise. ”
“Reorientation means an emphasis on the dignity of man, to on the sanctity of property. It means the creation of a society where human misery and poverty are repugnant to that society, not an indication of laziness or lack of initiative. The creation of new values means the establishment of a society based on free people, not free enterprise. ”
Connections
Carmichael had married Miriam Makeba, the noted singer from South Africa, while in the US in 1968. They divorced in Guinea after separating in 1973. Later he married Marlyatou Barry, a Guinean doctor. They divorced some time after having a son, Bokar, in 1981.
Father:
Adolphus
He was a carpenter who also worked as a taxi driver.
